Not necessarily, Tack. Parliament (or at least Congress, I don't know how this works elsewhere) has to make bills before voting on them. One of my major points was the disconnect between the ease of voting, and the difficulty of writing bills.
The most obvious way to solve this problem is to have the top X people rather than a threshold. I mean, the chamber only physically has so much space; it'd be better to keep the crowd at a constant size. Timewise, the obvious solution is to reallocate at fixed intervals. It could be a day or a week or a month or whatever. The hopscotchers are going to be the ones with the fewest votes in the chamber anyway, so it shouldn't have that much of an impact anyway.
Interesting. The exact details of the fixed intervals would matter, though. Thought: Let's say you want to be in Parliament. You have votes, but not enough (almost enough). Couldn't you just slander the bottom person out of a job?
It's a democracy. Vulnerability to mood swings is inherent in the system. There has always been the risk of votes suddenly not forthcoming when public opinion is against it; the first attempt to bail out the banks in 2008-9 failed when Representatives got cold feet after being inundated by angry mail. If a bill fails due to this it only had marginal support anyway, so I'm not worried too much about it. And there have always been phantom bills floating around waiting for their time to come.
Sure, but "vulnerability to dramatic swings in opinion" is not often touted as one of Democracy's benefits, because dramatic swings of policies are counter-productive. So unpassed bills aren't worried, about, ok that makes sense. What about ones that are already law? What if, say, Obamacare was repealed after it's difficult rollout, but there is not enough support to replace it? You say "If a bill fails due to this it only had marginal support anyway, so I'm not worried too much about it.", but you miss the point. All bills with enough support become laws after all, no matter how marginal, and there are conceptual, legal, and most importantly, practical issues behind the entire legal force of a law "flickering" on-and-off depending on the day or the week or the month. This is a question of practice.
The obvious solution is to require a threshold for passing above 50%. If it's 60% than there are 40% against it and public opinion would have to shift by twenty points to repeal, which seems like it wouldn't happen overnight.
Fair enough, but I will say that 60% is not enough to totally insulate it from the tyranny of the polls and focus groups. More generally: This still means that the system still has the "Whoever owns the media owns Parliament".
I think the important thing to remember is that politicians are almost infinitely replaceable in this scenario. Let's imagine that Mister A has a horrific scandal and his constituents abandon him. Where they are going to go is to someone very much like Mister A - minus the scandal - and the overall political character of the chamber is unaffected. Votes that backed a Conservative aren't going to fly to a Liberal due to a politician falling away the way they do now. They'll go to another Conservative who will vote nearly identically to Mister A, who can then step into Mister A's shoes.
This isn't true. Politicians aren't infinitely replicable. That's just straight up wrong. Even in the US there is a finite number of people willing and able to become members of Congress. People who actually have skill or talent at it - the elusive statesmen, rather than a politician - are worth their weight in gold. Even beyond that standard, people who have legislative experience is not infinite, and since the only standard for winning is convincing a certain number of supporters to your cause, I suspect their'd be a strong dearth of that. My point here is simply that Congressional culture matters, and you can't just argue it away. This system could have activists, professional politicians, university professors and everything in between fighting for influence.
Another thing to point out is that single-issue activists will be gone. Today, if you have a single issue that is all important to you, you may have to vote for someone who disagrees with you on many other things in order to support that single issue because the number of politicians is very limited for any position. But in a forwarding system, you can choose a politician who agrees with you on almost everything. There would be dozens or even hundreds of potential choices who all share your views on that single issue you care about and you can shop around for the perfect one.
Believable enough. Still didn't answer how to prevent Omnibus bills from occuring.
Crises and budgets would almost have to involve the Executive branch the way they do now. You can't have a situation where nobody proposes a budget or a response to a crisis; that would be a disaster.
The question of how the executive branch and this Parliament interacts is worth a short book on its own.
Here is a question. Let's say someone is corrupt. Not a member of Congress, but a lobbyist is bribing people. How does this system handle this? Does it? Presumably, it would be a lot easier to corrupt the relatively few people with most votes.
How does Legislative process work? Who runs this, and decides who votes? There has to be congressional process, but that would be non-trivial if congressional power shifted constantly.
EDIT: More generally, it seems like this system makes democracy a lot more vulnerable to short-term fluctuations of all types (corruption, crisis, bad news cycle), while arguing that whatever results is acceptable as long as there is a sufficient reaction against it later to fix it. But it seems like that would either paralyze government, or strongly weaken laws from Parliament. You're already taking away the ability to budget from it (with good reason, mind), isn't budget really the biggest power in government already? If Parliament constantly changes, or doesn't change, both results weaken it.
Author
Topic: A proposed new method of organizing a representative democracy (Read 1565 times)